


A Boy Built To Die Young

by TheBlackLagoon



Series: The Tin Man [1]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drabble, Happy Ending, I got sad and wrote this, M/M, prose work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:34:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26962222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBlackLagoon/pseuds/TheBlackLagoon
Summary: Billy Hargrove was a boy built to die young. There had never really been a question about it. The scars on his knuckles, the broken tilt of his nose, the chipped and grinning teeth; they all screamed it. A dead boy walking. Only a matter of time.
Relationships: Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington
Series: The Tin Man [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1979021
Comments: 2
Kudos: 46





	A Boy Built To Die Young

Billy Hargrove was a boy built to die young. There had never really been a question about it. The scars on his knuckles, the broken tilt of his nose, the chipped and grinning teeth; they all screamed it. A dead boy walking. Only a matter of time.

Like anyone who knows they have a ticking time bomb for a body, he did what he pleased, when he could. There was only so much one could do to feel alive, but he tried. He tried. California gave itself freely to him, with its beaches, and bright local, and there were times- sunny afternoons far away from death and home- where Billy was sure he would survive. That he would _live_.

Hawkins was a place where boys like him went to die. There was never a specific threat, but the cracks in the roads, the deeply chilling winters, the way the dark would hang on just a little longer in the early mornings; those were signs, omens that only a dead boy walking could see.

What’s to be expected of a boy with a lifeline like that? One does not go gentle into that good night. The halls of the school were filled to the brim with it. Death. The locals seemed to be obsessed with it. A freckle-faced boy detailed the towns sordid past to him one night, breath liquor-soaked and eyes shining with a sort of glee. All those disappearances, all those missing lives; the diner owner who’d blown out his brains, the gone and back again Byers kid, and poor old Barb who he’d seen the night before she’d gone.

_Gone where?_ Just gone. Hawkins swallowed people up like that. It just did.

There weren’t enough cigarettes in the world to settle him after that. He stopped seeing the freckle-faced boy, and he tried to ignore the signs piling up around him. Hawkins swallowed people up, it just did. And now it was gunning for Maxine.

The house is on the outskirts of town, and it too wails with it, begs for Billy. There is no escaping the aching death of this town.

He is met with fists and he’s not surprised, life has always been the one wrought with pain. But this boy, this one who meets him outside with a baseball bat, and weary eyes, has no lingering quality of the grave. Billy tries his best to beat that out of him.

A selfish endeavor, to see life and to want to extinguish it; but how difficult it is to see something you were never meant to have.

But Maxine comes home, and they are left at a standstill. Their house as always is a mortuary of sorts. He’s not been layed to rest yet, _but it was only a matter of time._

Summer hits, and the town boils, reeks from the stench of it. There’s a job at the pool that he wants, and he takes it and chases life some more. Not a life he wants, not a life he was ever meant to have, but a facsimile of it. Something he can hold in his hands, and say _this is living_. 

And he nearly drives himself toward it, makes it to the finish line with the prize, but there's that boy with the weary eyes- and he can’t. He calls in sick to work- true enough, he’s always been sick, hasn’t he? But it’s okay- because Karen never showed up anyway.

But none of that matters now, because Max is in more trouble, and the boy, the boy who won’t leave his dreams, sleeping or waking, is there too. Billy has never met a group of people so willing to survive, so sure that they will- And when he meets death incarnate at last, in a shopping mall filled with things he could never attain, it is a shifting, oozing creature of the once-living. And Billy has never, and will never be more scared. 

When he exits that mall, feeling drained, aching to his very core, there is only one thing on his mind.

He survived. Beyond all the odds, beyond death itself. He survived, and he’s leaning shoulder to shoulder with a boy, who wishes him no more harm, and he thinks-

“ _Billy Hargrove was a boy built to die young. But there’s nothing stopping him from trying to rebuild_.”

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to my Tumblr, which you can find [here](https://scoobydoo-ghoulschool.tumblr.com/) if you ever want to gently yell about Harringrove or any fandom-related things to me. I just needed to get this out, I've had the line "Billy Hrgove was a boy built to die young," in my head for weeks. Thank you for reading, and pls like and comment if you can :)  
> Edit: I now have a fantastic [moodboard](https://scoobydoo-ghoulschool.tumblr.com/post/632532333821657088/the-wonderful-memes-saved-me-made-me-a-moodboard) for this fic by [memes-saved-me](https://memes-saved-me.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr (Memessavedme on Ao3), so please go check it and memes-saved-me out!! :)


End file.
